Great Smokies Writing Program Classes

Instructor: Karen Tucker
Online via Zoom

4 sessions: July 7, 14, 21, & 28, 7:00-8:30pm
Cost: $200

Join author Karen Tucker for four Tuesdays in July to read, discuss, write, and workshop flash fiction. A genre most often defined by its length, flash fiction has additional distinct characteristics that set it apart from longer stories. It’s also a form that invites risk-taking, rule-breaking, and experimentation. July is the perfect month to cook up some juicy, bite-sized stories and bring them to the literary picnic. The final class will include publishing strategies.

Karen Tucker is the author of the novel Bewilderness (Catapult, 2021). Her flash and short fiction can be found in The Yale Review, Tin House, The Missouri Review, Boulevard, American Literary Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Instructor: Todd Boss
In-person at UNC Asheville

July 11, 1:00-4:00pm
Cost: $75

Poetry’s engines run on sound. By attending to the reader’s “ear,” we control their breath, and all the effects of their experience with our words. This generative course from a “master of internal rhyme” (Georgia Review) will start with the preverbal musical fundamentals of syntax and rocket through the rhythmsphere into the spooky ether of aural energy. We’ll sound the hammers and anvils of ear-training while attuning to breath, buried and slant rhyme, sonic echo, rhythm-bending, and vocality to recall how poetry is ultimately a sonic/somatic pleasure, built on waves.

You will need: 1. a recording device (smartphone okay), 2. at least two of your own poems (works in progress okay), 3. writing tools of your choice, and 4. one piece of music you love (ready to play aloud, optional)..

Todd Boss is the producer of over 150 poetry films, an internationally acclaimed augmented-reality installation artist, and the author of four poetry collections from W. W. Norton as well as a children’s book and Emmy-winning and Grammy-nominated librettos that have premiered at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. He hosts the podcast “There’s a Poem in That,” in which he writes poems for complete strangers. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, and on NPR.

Parking: Visitors to UNCA campus will need to purchase a $3 visitor parking permit.

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Instructor: Tamara Federici
CRN: 60406
Meets in-person in Asheville (location TBD)
Saturdays, 12:00-2:30pm: Sept. 19, 26, Oct. 3, 10, & 17

What better way to stick it to the man than by actively learning about comedy in a time of chaos and despair? Humor is an art form we can study to strengthen our funny bones and our resilience! We can laugh while learning about power imbalances. We can study underrepresented points of view while learning what our own comedic voice sounds like. We’ll discuss the tools and the places comedy winds its way through to make a point, including: Satire, Mockumentary, Absurdity, Truth to Power, and Social Commentary. We’ll discover how the life cycle of a joke or essay works. And we’ll write funny short work both individually and as a group…

How do you write hilarious pieces while the horrific is happening? And how much do you incorporate into your work? See how other writers and artists have traversed this path. We’ll study the how and why. Your words have power. Come explore how comedy is adept at creating connection while pointing out and puncturing facades. Plus, it’s fun! All levels are welcome.

Instructor: Tiana Kennell
CRN: 60642
Meets online via Zoom
Tuesdays, 6:00-8:30pm: Sept. 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13, & 20

Collect and retell the stories of your family, life, and community. In this course, students will receive guidance on unearthing lesser-known stories and preserving history through interviews and narrative writing. In-class and at-home assignments will include conducting conversations with strangers, loved ones, and neighbors, then transforming the information and anecdotes into creative pieces that can be shared, kept for personal record-keeping, used in a memoir, or passed down to the next generations. Students will also practice writing original tribute-style obituaries and living legacies.

Each week will combine brief examples, craft discussion, and guided generative work, with optional sharing/feedback. By the end of the course, students will leave with multiple short experiments and at least one more developed piece (or a strong start on a larger project), along with a practical toolkit for continuing.

Instructor: Brit Washburn
CRN: 60850
Meets in-person in Asheville (location TBD)
Saturdays, 3:00-5:30pm: Sept. 26, Oct. 3, 10, 17, & 24

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore artists’ statements, the ars poetica, manifestos, and self-portrait poems both philosophically and as literary forms. We’ll read selections by Maggie Queeney, Denise Duhamel, Archibald MacLeish, James Baldwin, Joyce Sutphen, Diane Seuss, Edward Hirsch, Kimiko Hahn, and Evie Shockley, among others. We’ll take these writers and their works as models, and begin to consider what our bodies of work are “similar to,” what they “often employ” (aspirationally or in fact), what our work is and/or what we hope it to become. We’ll consider the form or forms our work takes or might take, how our identities and backgrounds might inform our work, what we are “drawn to” and “interested in,” and what we believe a poem (story, essay) should (or should not) do/be. We’ll consider who we are and what we do in addition to or apart from writing: what we love, what we do not like, and what we “insist on.” We’ll explore what we “must do” and what our responsibilities are—as artists and otherwise. Whether a fledgling or seasoned writer, these reflective exercises will support you in orienting yourself according to where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going as an artist.

Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023) and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (2019) and What Is Given (2025), both from Wet Cement Press. She teaches at Virginia Tech and co-curates the Juniper Bends reading series. She also serves as Associate Editor for Criticism and Interviews at The Great Smokies Review and as Nonfiction Editor at Only Poems, to which she contributes regularly. Recently, her work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, The Christian Century, and the anthology Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Floods.

Instructor: Jacquelyn Nasti
CRN: 60545
Meets at Hanger Hall School in Asheville
Mondays, 6:30–9:00pm: Sept. 28, Oct. 5, 12, 19, & 26

Instructor: Elliot Reed
CRN: 60851
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center
Wednesdays, 7:00-9:30pm: Sept. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28, & Nov. 4

This workshop promises that you will leave with a draft of a novel. Your first novel? Maybe yes, maybe no, but probably your first fragmented novel.

This course will include a major focus on creativity practice. Weekly exercises and prompts will reduce writing anxiety and build an atmosphere of creativity in the workshop space. Course material will help us read through the “ephemeralist” lens. We will find ephemera and write ephemera to take the pressure off of the product. Someone said, “Short stories are like wild animals that come out of the woods at night. You must learn not to scare them away.”
Earth is an overgrown heap of accidental writing and this course asks you to plunder and mine for overlooked things.

The short story, the poem, and the novel dominate published literature, but what else can literature be? Nothing is as exciting to read as a hand-written love note found torn and discarded in the landscaping. Find one note and write its replies, write more replies, and you have two fictional lives. In this course we will produce literature in unconventional forms. We will write epistolary stories, stories found on grocery lists, stories made by astronomers tracking and recording the movements of celestial bodies… If you have a short story or novel you are working on, you will be encouraged to bring in pages for workshop. Students will produce new work each session and leave with a finished work composed of fragments.

We will have some special guests, including Chelsea Martin, author of Caca Dolce, whom Lena Dunham has called the “preeminent chronicler of Internet age malaise.”

Elliot Reed is an author and teacher whose work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Panacea Review, and Little Star, among other places. His debut novel, A Key to Treehouse Living (Tin House, 2018) was shortlisted for a Mark Twain Award. He lives in East Asheville with his wife, son, and small dog.

Instructor: Savannah Brooks
CRN: 61196
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm: Sept. 7, 14, 28, Oct. 5, 12, 19, 26, Nov. 2, 9, & 16

Breaking down the publishing landscape into three sectors, this course focuses on the logistics, best approaches, and necessary materials for landing your work at literary and entertainment magazines, independent and university presses, and traditional and hybrid publishers. Students should arrive to class with three different materials prepared: 1. a polished draft of a short-form piece (poem, short story, essay); 2. an idea for a nonfiction short-form piece to be pitched (you don’t have to be a CNF writer, you just need an idea); and 3. an excerpt from a long-form piece or manuscript. You’ll leave with drafts of cover letters, short-form pitches, query letters, and long-form proposals (including author bios) that can be used as templates going forward.

This class will be more lecture- and feedback-based than generative, though students will have time to workshop their short-form work and an excerpt of a longer work.

Savannah Brooks earned her MFA from Hamline University and spent the first decade of her career working on/in literary magazines, small presses, and traditional publishing, as an editor and as a literary agent. After contracting a disabling case of long COVID, she quasi-retired to focus on writing and teaching. Her essays, book reviews, short stories, and poetry have appeared in The Guardian, Calyx, and Prime Number Magazine, among over a dozen other publications, and she’s been nominated for a Best of the Net Award.

Instructor: Tim Early
CRN: 61197
Meets in-person at Grace Episcopal Church
Sundays, 3:00-5:30pm: Sept. 6, 13, 20, 27, Oct. 4, 11, 18, 25, Nov. 1 & 8

The term “nature poetry” perhaps conjures up notions of description-laden odes, idealized pastoral scenes, and Romantic pronouncements about the poet’s “oneness” with their surroundings. While there are doubtless sterling examples of these kinds of poems, the tradition of nature writing in Appalachia is far more complex, examining a host of environmental and philosophical issues—environmental degradation, resource extraction, climate change, stewardship, and the complex, deeply embedded, ever-changing relationship between the individual subject and/or society in relation to what we might call “nature.”

In this course, we’ll write poems that attempt to examine nature in its full complexity, with the abiding caveat that this is almost certainly a complexity we are not fully able to grasp. That gap can be where things get interesting.

In addition to weekly writing prompts and discussions of student poems, we’ll read a variety of Appalachian nature writing and ecopoetic texts. Required texts are bell hooks’ An Appalachian Elegy, Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Jonathan Williams’ Jubilant Thicket, and Wendell Berry’s The Mad Farmer Poems. These texts will be supplemented with reading packets provided by the instructor, which will include a wide range of Appalachian writing about nature and some theoretical underpinnings for the course, including Arne Naess’s concept of deep ecology and Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology.